About Cairn Labs
A cairn is a stack of stones that marks the path — each one placed deliberately, each one load-bearing. It's how we think about software: products stand or fall on foundations nobody applauds, and the teams who place those stones carefully are the ones whose work is still standing years later.
Cairn Labs started in 2021 with a simple irritation: agencies that disappear after launch. We'd watched too many founders inherit undocumented codebases, unanswered emails and invoices for “discovery phases” that discovered nothing. So we built the agency we'd want to hire — small, senior, allergic to jargon, and structured around what happens after the launch party.
Four years and sixty-plus projects later, the shape of the work has stayed the same: mobile apps, web platforms, automations, and long retainer partnerships. Most of our clients are still with us. That's the metric we actually optimise for.
How we work
Small team, senior only
No juniors learning on your budget, no account managers in the middle. The people on your project are the people writing your code.
Ship every week
Working software on a weekly cadence — TestFlight builds, preview URLs, written updates. Progress you can click, not progress decks.
Code you own
Your repository, your infrastructure, your accounts, from day one. Documented well enough that leaving us is a planned week, not a crisis.
Honest answers
If a rebuild is a waste of your money, we say so. If a deadline is at risk, you hear it from us first. Plain English, no padding.
“Every engagement we take, we ask one question first: will this still be good software in three years? If the honest answer is no, we change the plan until it's yes.”
— the Cairn Labs team
Sound like your kind of team?
See the work, or skip straight to the conversation.